Halloween Die-ary: October 5, 2018

Tonight, we dropped by Lull Farm to pick our pumpkins. Of all the activities in my Halloween Season, carving the pumpkin is the most sacred. So, by extension, is picking the pumpkin. It’s serious business. Almost like an adoption. Or choosing a victim. To the point that I recently suggested to my wife that if our imminent baby is a boy, we should consider Jack for his name. Because then he’d be Jack O.

But not so much this year.

Tonight, I chose a pumpkin in minutes. No ritual. No stress. No pomp. No circumstance. No whispering quietly to each candidate in a distant corner of the patch. I’m not sure why, but I actually feel like it’s been slowly trending this way for me over the past few years. I’m assuming one of four reasons, though.

1. Farmers are getting bad-ass at making perfectly shaped pumpkins in the richest shade of orange with deep grooves and thick stems full of personality. Kind of like what’s happened to apples. They all look like plastic fruit now, they’re so perfect.

2. I’m getting lazier in my advanced age. I mean, I know this thing is inevitably going to end up in a black bag at my curb, so maybe my subconscious is running the show a bit more now.

3. Maybe the softness of age has softened my empathy, and I know that, like Charlie Brown and his Christmas tree, any pumpkin is worth picking.

4. Now that we’re a family of four-going-on-five, we get that many pumpkins, so the individual pumpkins almost don’t matter. Groups of pumpkins always look great.

Back home, we watched a “meh” episode of the new kids’ anthology horror series Creeped Out and then my wife and I watched a movie I’ve wanted to watch for years now: The 1988 Fabrizio Laurenti-directed flick Witchery. Or Witchraft. Or Evil Encounters. Or, knowing the Italians, Zombi 12.

I have a very specific reason for wanting to watch this movie. Not because David Hasselhoff is in it. Although that’s a pretty good reason. Not because Linda Blair is in it. Also a pretty good reason. But solely for the fact that it was filmed at an abandoned hotel on a peninsula in Cohasset, Massachusetts.

I’d always wanted to check out the filming site. See if it was still around. See if it was accessible. See if I’d run into David Hasselhoff there reminiscing about the good times. But based on the fact that Google Street View wasn't showing that area of the peninsula and the scant info about it in general online, I’m assuming it’s off limits to mere mortals.

But now that I’ve seen the movie, I can finally find out…tomorrow.